Advertising Specialty Institute

Advertising Speciality Institute required a unified ticketing system that
could intelligently manage support requests across multiple brands and departments.

The Challenge

Being the world's largest promotional product membership organization comes with a lot of responsibility.
Promotional products make up a $22.9 billion industry, and it's no wonder why. Branded items like hats,
T-shirts and bags are meaningful, portable advertisements that leave a firm impression - making them an
absolutely boundless tool for building long-lasting brand awareness.

ASI supports this thriving industry through a number of ways, including a proprietary platform that links
product suppliers with distributors, website creation services, and a range of award-winning industry
publications. As well as maintaining a commitment to provide industry-leading services, ASI is also
highly-committed to providing a excellent standard of support to its customers.

As Executive Director of Technical Product Support, Matt Goldfarb manages a team of over 20 dedicated
support staff that service a diverse range of clients. "Our customers range from a one-person business
to an enterprise organization with several-hundred people," explains Matt. "There are lots of different
and complex aspects to the support we provide. Customers ask questions about the software, report issues,
and request live video training. Every time we add new enhancements or features to our platform, we're
constantly listening to feedback and communicating with the people who use it."

As an organization with a diverse range of services and clients, Matt and his team needed to ensure they
could manage support interactions with both efficiency and excellence. Prior to using Deskpro, ASI was
using a email management system called eGain to manage customer support interactions. "It wasn't a ticketing
system, and that was my biggest concern. It was just a way to manage email," says Matt. "When I joined ASI
over five years ago, my main goal was to bring a ticketing system into the organization."

About ASI

Advertising Specialty Institute, (ASI) is the promotional product industry’s largest membership organization
offering members - including Fortune 500 companies - the best promotional product related services, products,
education, research and content available.
ASI clients are made up of both Suppliers - who create, source and imprint products, and Distributors - who
then creatively market and sell the imprinted products to clients who use them to promote their business.

With highly-specific needs for a ticketing system, Matt and his team went about looking for a solution
that could meet a multitude of requirements. "We manage a number of separate brands, and it's important
to us to keep these separate when it comes to tracking how customers interact with them," explains Matt.
"This allows us to trace different entry points across our entire organization."

Matt and his team found that balancing segmented support with a unified system was difficult. The need
to retain and harness the nuances between the way differentiated brands handled support was a high-priority
for ASI, but finding a solution that could achieve this was seemingly more difficult than it should be.

"We examined at least four or five different applications, including Freshdesk, Zendesk, and Desk.com,"
tells Matt. "We heavily vetted all those applications, and at the end of the day we found that Deskpro
was the right choice for us. It was very difficult to find an application that could support our multiple branding."

Matt describes his frustrations with how other help desk software providers offer multibrand capability.
"The pricing plan for multibrand capability included a lot of features that we didn't need. It doesn't make
sense to charge so much for a feature that is necessary for the normal day-to-day workflow of a number of
businesses," tells Matt. "After spending some time pushing hard to try and find a solution, they could not
successfully handle multiple operational workflows. Deskpro could, and that's one of the main reasons we
chose the platform." Another aspect of Deskpro that Matt highlighted was the pricing structure. "The pricing
is competitive, realistic and straightforward. We were very happy with that."

After selecting Deskpro to become the new ticketing system and help desk for ASI, Matt and his colleagues
considered deploying a self-hosted version of the software. "In the end, we decided to opt for the cloud
version of Deskpro in order to reduce complexity for our technical team," explains Matt. "Still, we were
impressed to see Deskpro give us the option to deploy as we saw fit."

During the implementation process, the Deskpro team worked closely with ASI to ensure the software was
rolled out successfully and smoothly. "We really appreciated the onboarding process with Deskpro. All the
people we worked with at Deskpro helped us get to the point we're at today," says Matt. "The team was very
helpful and we felt like we had a great partnership at every step of the process. We have never felt invisible
or lost in a sea of other customers."

"We heavily vetted several applications, and found Deskpro was the right choice.
It was very difficult to find an application that could support our multiple branding needs at a flat price.
"

Matt Goldfarb

Executive Director of Technical Product Support, ASI

"I have the lowest number of agents on my team for a couple of years,
but we're still able to maintain support requests effectively because of Deskpro.
"

Matt Goldfarb,Executive Director of Technical Product Support, ASI

The Benefits

After implementing Deskpro, Matt quickly found ASI could make full-use of multibrand
live chat features. ASI used Deskpro to segment their incoming chats by brand and department,
allowing for more streamlined support and sales operations. "Our sales team don't get support
chats, and vice versa," says Matt. "Customers contacting us via our different brand pages
automatically get connected to the most appropriate agents without having to go through a
process that generates friction for them. That is a big win for us."

ASI quickly started to experience significant benefits in the realm of agent performance and
efficiency. Using their old system, they found it almost impossible to improve and streamline
the workflow of agents. "The one improvement that has been the most visible is the activity
and output of each individual agent. Intelligent routing options make everything much more
efficient. I have the lowest number of agents on my team for a couple of years, but we're able
to maintain support requests effectively, because of Deskpro."

Another one of the clear and measurable benefits ASI experienced from using Deskpro is the
increased accountability the system delivers. Matt and his team use Deskpro's SLA function to
track ticket and chat response and resolution times. "We value being able to track metrics using
the SLA function," says Matt. "We can better understand how customers are interacting with our
organization using reports, and can tweak our training, resources and processes to meet standards."

After using Deskpro for over a year, Matt describes the amount of value ASI continue to receive
from the platform. "I enjoy the consistent updates and releases from Deskpro. We selected Deskpro
for the range of features it delivers as standard, and more are added on a regular basis," explains
Matt. "We also provide feature suggestions and improvements to the Deskpro team using the feedback system on the portal."

"We've also learnt how to manage our knowledgebase in a truly effective way, too", says Matt.
"It was only customer facing upon conceptualization, but now we have a completely internal
knowledgebase that supports the agents in their learning and development."

"All-in-all, we are very happy with Deskpro," tells Matt. "I look forward to continuing to
build our relationship with Deskpro and trying the new features that come out."

The Future

Over a year after deployment, Matt and ASI are now gearing up to roll Deskpro out to other departments.
"Now that we have a few in-house Deskpro experts, we can easily deploy the platform across other departments,"
explains Matt. "This will enable us to work in a way that is much more joined-up than before."

"Without Deskpro, it would be very difficult to run customer support across various brands and
departments in the way we do now. It would become a monstrous challenge to manage the day-to-day
processes we rely on as a business. With Deskpro, we can always ensure customers get the support
they need with ease."

"Customers contacting us via different brands automatically get connected to the
most appropriate agents without having to go through a process that generates
friction for them. That's a really big win for us.
"

Matt Goldfarb

Executive Director of Technical Product Support, ASI

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